


tell me, will you stay now? ('cause i feel like i'm safe now)

by LostHowl



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical themes, Emotional Roller Coaster, Falling In Love, Fluff, Heartwarming, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death (references to Daisya), Parallel Relationships, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, this is literally a spot the parallels game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26273959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostHowl/pseuds/LostHowl
Summary: In a voice he’d recognize anywhere without a second’s hesitation, he hears a soft, happy, sincere, “Yuu!”He wants to turn. He needs to turn around right now, and he’s fighting his body as much as he can. It’s a losing battle. He's more desperate to turn around than he’s ever been for anything in his life. His heart jumps up into his throat. He wants to move, wants to turn, wants to see who’s calling him and run into his arms and stay there. Then, he hears again—“—nda!”Huh? What was that?“—anda!”Since when did Alma call him—“Kanda!”(Kanda sees Alma in his dreams, and Allen when he's awake. He comes to a number of realizations.)
Relationships: Kanda Yuu & Alma Karma, Kanda Yuu/Allen Walker, Kanda Yuu/Alma Karma
Comments: 32
Kudos: 153





	tell me, will you stay now? ('cause i feel like i'm safe now)

**Author's Note:**

> no real canon spoilers apart from daisya's death and the artificial exorcists arc. this is set after the current flashback (chapter 232-) and takes place in a world where kanda and allen run away together - at least temporarily, hence the compliance and divergence from canon. there is a reference to allen and the 14th, but blink and you'll miss it.
> 
> as per canon, alma /is/ dead, but he is alive in a different form. there is mention of his death, but as far as this fic goes, he is also alive. it's... complicated.
> 
> also, better safe than sorry: there are rats in this. there's mention of one at first where allen touches it, then they're mentioned a few times on and off but there's only one explicit interaction with them.

Kanda is standing in a field.

The grass is soft under his bare feet and the tips of the blades brush his ankles. The hills and plains of grass roll on endlessly and there’s nothing around him but green grass until the horizon. When he looks up, the sky is just breaking into morning, the dark bluish-purple of the night fading into an orange with the slightest hint of light blue threatening to ruin this scenery.

He thinks he hears the sound of water flowing somewhere  — a river or a stream? — but he can’t see anything that corresponds with the noise.

Something in him doesn’t want to move, maybe afraid that this landscape will be destroyed the moment he tries to move an inch. Regardless, he takes a step forward (or what he thinks is forward; every direction looks the same) and starts walking slowly, feeling the grass brush against his feet.

This place is open and peaceful. He might’ve wished to come to a place like this before, but no part of this is familiar. Nothing this peaceful could ever be familiar to him.

He keeps walking. He doesn’t know where he is and doesn’t know where he’s going, but he doesn’t stop. Somehow, deep down, he knows not to stop.

The distinct sound of laughter cuts through the image like a dagger.

Kanda turns sharply, trying to find where it came from. There’s no one around him, but someone is definitely laughing.

He turns around and walks back, wondering if the laughter is getting louder or if he’s losing his mind. The walking turns into running, and he’s suddenly chasing after the soft laughter, going all the way back to and past where he started. Something about it is nauseatingly familiar, something he’s heard and repeated to himself over and over, but he can’t recognize it.

The sound stops abruptly, and Kanda stops in his tracks, looking around. There are no sounds anymore, not even the faint water he was hearing before. He doesn’t want to look stupid and call out, asking if anyone is around, but he wonders if his voice would even come out if he tried to talk.

The silence is deafening but not irritating.

The sky hasn’t changed. There is no bright blue to ruin this.

He hears something behind him, a rustling in the grass. He wants to turn, but his body is frozen.

Then, in a voice he’d recognize anywhere without a second’s hesitation, he hears a soft, happy, sincere, “Yuu!”

Kanda is still frozen. He wants to turn, more desperate to turn around than he’s ever been for anything in his life. His heart jumps up into his throat. A sudden wind passes by, ruffling through his hair. The strands tickle his face and he can feel the wind run through the long, long locks. It raises goosebumps on his skin.

“Yuu!”

He wants to turn. He  _ needs _ to turn around right now, and he’s fighting his body as much as he can. It’s a losing battle. He feels like a fucking marionette being forced to stand like this. He wants to move, wants to turn, wants to see who’s calling him and run into his arms and stay there. Then, he hears again—

“—nda!”

_ Huh? What was that? _

“—anda!”

Since when did Alma call him—

“Kanda!”

Kanda jolts awake.

He’s struggling to breathe for the first few seconds, scrambling to sit up properly. His vision is blurry and hazy at the edges, and it’s  _ hot and suffocating _ and he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. The dream is already fading away, the sounds and sensations dissolving into nothing and Kanda wants to  _ scream _ . He doesn’t want to lose him, not again, not like—

“Hey,” says a voice from beside him, concerned and careful, “Kanda?”

He looks down beside the stack of boxes he’s sleeping on. Allen is looking up at him with big, unblinking eyes, crouched on the ground beside the makeshift bed with a blanket tangled around his legs. 

“What?” he asks, his voice rough from sleep. He shifts from the position he’s in right now (on his back, propped up on his elbows) and sits up properly, still waiting for the tips of his fingers to stop being numb.

“You were shaking in your sleep,” Allen says softly. Kanda looks down at his hands like they’ve betrayed him. “What did you dream about?”

Kanda looks back at him, and it must be sharper than he intended, because Allen scrambles to say, “ah, no— I mean, you don’t have to tell me! I just thought… if you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Kanda says decidedly, he does not. The dream is already long gone, burned away like a piece of paper crumbling into ashes. He feels the ghost sensation of grass at his feet and immediately looks around the floor for his shoes. They’re lying at the foot of the boxes, one fallen on its side.

He reaches for Mugen first, picking the sword up and holding the scabbard tightly. His eyes drift shut for just a moment, and when he opens them again, he feels grounded. He and Allen are on the run right now, trying to get somewhere and anywhere far enough from the Order until they know what to do. He remembers. It’s fine.

Unclenching his jaw and swallowing over the lump in his throat, Kanda asks, “was anyone laughing?”

Allen blinks. He glances around the abandoned shack they’re in with a blank expression, clearly indicating the lack of anybody apart from them nearby. Kanda grits his teeth at that. Allen just looks back at him, shrugs, and says, “I don’t know. I was sleeping, too."

Kanda swings his legs off the makeshift bed and puts his boots on, yanking on the laces far tighter than he needs to.

“Looks like it’s barely sunrise,” Allen comments, and Kanda fully freezes. “It’s almost time to get up. It’s a little early, but you— huh? Kanda?”

It’s too obvious. There’s a stark image from his dream flashing in front of his eyes, and another memory ringing in his head - one from when Alma said those  _ exact _ words to him, and he isn’t awake enough to make his reactions subtle.

“Nothing,” Kanda mutters, grabbing his coat that he’s rolled up as a pillow before standing up with Mugen in hand. He walks over to the shack’s door on shaky legs and yanks the frail door open, stepping outside.

The air is immediately cold and sobering. Kanda waits an extra second for it to sting before he pulls his coat on. His hair gets trapped inside it, and in a moment of panic, he pulls it out and over his shoulder to make sure it’s still long.  _ It is, _ he realizes with a sigh of relief. For one unnatural moment, right when he thinks he can feel the ends of his hair touch his collarbones, he wants to grab Mugen and cut all his hair off.

Instead of that, Kanda just tosses it over his shoulder again and runs a hand through it slowly.

He takes a slow breath in and exhales, seeing his breath turn into a misty cloud. He inhales again, this time tipping his head back to look up at the sky, and exhales again.

The sky is just breaking into morning, the dark bluish-purple of the night fading into an orange with light blue threatening to ruin this morning. It’s simultaneously exactly like and not at all like his dream. This one won’t last. The bright blue will win.

The door opens behind him, and Kanda tilts forward again, looking away from the sky.

Allen steps out, stretching his arms above his head. He’s wearing his jacket and coat and boots now, but his hair is still down. He offers Kanda a sweet smile (sweet enough to remind Kanda how much he hates sweets) and says, “good morning.”

Kanda tears his eyes away, then looks back when Allen ties his hair up. He holds the ribbon in his teeth while scraping his fingers against his scalp to pull the white strands back, shifting them into one hand and using the other to grab a ribbon and tie a tight knot around it.

“It’s funny, right?” Allen says with a small laugh that turns into mist in the morning cold.

Kanda narrows his eyes slightly. “What is?”

“When we first met, you were the one with your hair tied up and I left mine down,” Allen says, “now you’re the one with your hair down and I’m tieing mine up.”

Kanda blinks. “What part of that is funny?”

Allen shrugs. He amends, “maybe not funny. I guess it’s…” he turns to the sky, smiling at the light blue coming up over the horizon. “It means you’ve changed.”

Kanda’s breath gets caught in his throat.

“We both have,” Allen acquiesces. “To be fair, you were a real asshole when we first met.”

Kanda’s eyebrow twitches in irritation. “Huh?”

“Oh, please. You’ve given me that glare so many times now. Do you really think it still works?”

Kanda may feel indebted to Allen and may feel the need to repay his kindness for letting himself get stabbed trying to stop him from killing Alma, but he is absolutely willing to unsheath Mugen right now and remind this beansprout that he’s far from all bark and no bite.

Allen doesn’t flinch at his expression. He has the audacity to look amused, instead, and sarcastically says, “oh, no, I’m terrified of you, please don’t hurt me! You shake me down to my very core —” he pauses to laugh, waving a hand in dismissal, “— come on.”

Forget hurt. Kanda wants to  _ kill _ him.

\--

After a few hours of walking, they come across a farm truck whose driver is kind enough to let them climb in the back and come along as far as he’s going. Halfway through a carrot with a half-eaten ear of corn in his hand, Allen says, “you know, at times like this, I really miss Jerry’s cooking.”

Kanda studies him for a second. There’s a smear of red on his cheek from the raw tomato he just devoured like a fucking chicken leg and he looks way too satisfied with the carrot he’s chewing on to be taken seriously. Still, Kanda doesn’t have it in him to disagree. Jerry’s cooking is half the reason he even stayed at the Order. 

“Yeah,” he says finally. “The cafeteria always annoyed me, though.”

“That’s just because people annoy you,” Allen says, only smiling when Kanda gives him a glare to shut him up. “You really think that still works, huh?”

“Try that again,” Kanda prompts in a warning tone. Allen just laughs a bit, blinks at him innocently  _ (infuriatingly) _ , then turns to look at the landscape they’re driving by.

“Can I ask you something?” he asks, breaking the brief silence.

Kanda barely stifles a sigh. “If it’s about something annoying, I don’t wanna hear it.”

Allen turns back to him, swallows a mouthful of food and says, “it’s about your dream.”

Kanda tightens his grip on Mugen. “I don’t wanna hear it.”

“I’m just saying —” Allen continues, because he has no regard for his own safety, “—you can talk about it if you want. We both know a lot about each other, so it’s not like anything is gonna surprise me at this point.”

Kanda doesn’t want to dignify that with a response, but he also figures saying nothing will only make Allen want to know about it more. So, he relents, “I already forgot it. It’s not important.”

“Oh,” Allen says. “Okay, then.”

In the ensuing silence, Kanda drowns out the sounds of the wagon’s wheels against the bumpy road and tries to remember how it felt to stand in the field from his dream again. The grass under his bare feet, the wind rustling through his hair, the faint sound of water, the sharp laughter that makes his heart sink, the soft voice calling him—

\--

“—Yuu!”

Kanda blinks. Once, twice, and again for good measure. He’s in the same place again, the field with endless rolling hills of grass and the sky stuck at sunrise. The grass beneath his feet feels slightly damp, but more than any of that, he’s staring right at a stream passing through the grass. Large, round rocks separate the water from the grass, and standing on one of them, balancing precariously, is…

“... Alma.”

Alma turns to him with a bright grin. “Hi, Yuu!”

Kanda slowly takes a step forward, closer. Then another, and another, until he’s standing at the foot of the rock Alma is standing on top of, looking up at him.

“What’s with that look?” Alma asks, sounding defensive. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

He probably would, if anything he’s feeling right now made any sense to him. “You died. I— you died in front of me. You died in my arms.”

A small, sad smile tugs on Alma’s lips. “I did. But I’m here, too.”

Kanda stares, dumbfounded. It only prompts Alma to laugh. “Even you can make a face like that, huh?”

“You…” Kanda says breathlessly, not sure what words would do this situation justice. “You’re here? With me?”

Alma only smiles. “Where else would I go?”

Kanda reaches out slowly, his arms shaking more than they ever have, and he stretches them up towards Alma. Alma just watches him in curiosity, not doing anything to encourage or stop him until Kanda’s hands stop abruptly an inch away from his face.

Alma tilts his head a bit in question. When Kanda doesn’t move any further, he takes hold of his hands and pulls them forward, placing them on his cheeks.

Kanda’s breath stutters and his head swims and he’s shaking all over again because it’s real, it’s  _ real, _ he can touch Alma, there’s flesh and bone under his hands, Alma’s skin is warm and comforting and he deliriously thinks he might be crying right now.

Alma leans into Kanda’s touch, still not letting go of his hands. Kanda sighs shakily, carefully running his thumbs over Alma’s cheekbones. He stops right under Alma’s eyes, pausing at the blue ink running from his eyes down his cheeks in triangles. He still has the little scar going over his nose, the same one he always had.

“What?” Alma asks softly with a little smile.

Kanda shakes his head, not trusting his voice. There’s no way this is real. It’s—

“—too good to be true?” Alma asks, somehow filling in Kanda’s exact thought. It must show on his face, too, if Alma’s amused expression is anything to go by. “I get that you’re shocked, but seriously? Are you too cool for hugs now?”

Kanda blinks, his face twisting into a familiar scowl before he yanks his arms away. “I don’t do hugs.”

Alma rolls his eyes and says mockingly,  _ “oh, look at me! I’m Yuu, a super cool exorcist with a sword and long hair! I don’t do hugs!” _

“I don’t sound like that!”

“You do too!”

“I do not!”

“You do!”

“I do not!”

“You totally do!”

They both just glare at each other for a minute until it’s too much, it’s too stupid, and they’re both laughing. Alma hops down from the rock he’s standing on so he doesn’t lose his balance and fall over, and there’s nothing but the sound of them laughing filling up Kanda’s senses. It’s not the one he heard last night - that was the sound of them laughing as kids. They’re both grown up this time.

“Come on,” Alma insists after his laughter dies down, “for old times’ sake?”

Kanda rolls his eyes harmlessly and takes a step forward before wrapping his arms around Alma’s stomach, tightening his grip the moment he feels Alma’s arms around him. He knows he shouldn’t, because it’s unrealistic and it never lasts, but in the warmth of Alma’s arms that have his eyes drifting shut, Kanda lets himself let go.

He lets himself feel safe.

“All that talk about not doing hugs,” Alma teases softly, “only for you to cling to me the first chance you got.”

“Shut up,” Kanda mumbles against Alma’s shoulder, still not letting go. He opens his eyes briefly, just to make sure they’re still there in the peaceful, endless field with the rocks and the stream and the orange sky. Satisfied with what he sees, Kanda closes them again.

When he blinks them open again, there’s a gloved hand waving in his face.

“Hell- _ ooo _ ?” Allen calls, blinking his big eyes at him, way too close for comfort. Kanda tries to shift back, but there’s something solid behind him that won’t move.

“What the fuck do you want?” he barks out, pushing Allen away with a hand to his face.

“Ah— hey!” Allen protests, moving back. “You fell asleep, I was just trying to wake you up!”

“By shoving your hand in my face?!”

“You weren’t waking up when I called your name!”

Kanda sighs, pressing his hand to his face and running through a mental list of why he can’t just kill Allen right now. It’s a short list, starting with  _ I still owe him for what happened with Alma _ and ending with  _ I still owe him for what happened with Alma. _

“We’re here,” Allen says, “the truck stopped. The driver said he’s just gonna go back the way he came in a short while, so we should get off here.”

“Yeah,” Kanda says with a slight nod, moving his hand off his face. “Okay.”

They both hop off the truck, Allen with a poorly-hidden vegetable in his pocket. He goes to thank the driver while Kanda looks around to make sure no one (or nothing) followed them.

“Are we good?” Allen asks, coming back up to Kanda. Kanda nods, and Allen nods at that, and they both start walking towards the woods they see a few feet away. It’s best to stay out of sight, and if that means travelling through woods and hitchhiking on unsuspecting vehicles, then that’s the compromise they’ll have to make.

“You know,” Allen says softly once they’re well inside the woods and walking through, “I still don’t understand why you’re coming with me.”

Kanda’s brain shuts down at the implication of the statement. He still hasn’t told Allen that he feels indebted to him, and he has no intention of doing so.

“Didn’t you say you were offered a position as a General?”

Kanda nods slightly. “Yeah.”

“Why wouldn’t you go back and take it? Running around with me, if anything, is just taking you further away from that. People could’ve been calling you ‘Kanda-gensui’ by now.”

Allen’s right, Kanda knows, but… “I’ve got reasons.”

With a tone, Allen says, “if you’d like to share, I can’t think of anyone in the vicinity who’d be opposed to that.”

Kanda pushes a branch out of his face before sighing. He stops walking, standing on a large tree root coming out of the ground, and turns to Allen.

“Alma’s dead. I have no reason to swallow down my hatred for the Order anymore. I’m not jumping in the air in excitement at the prospect of a high-ranking position in the institution that created and tortured us.”

Allen freezes, looking slightly guilty. Instead of apologizing, he asks, “then why’d you go back at all?”

Kanda touches Mugen instinctively, then drops his hand. He sees Allen follow the gesture, and, really, he could stop there, because that’s enough of an answer, but, “there are things I need to do before I die.”

“Okay,” Allen says softly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you—”

“Yeah, whatever,” Kanda cuts him off dismissively and starts walking again. Allen’s footsteps start from behind him a second later, and between the sounds of leaves crunching beneath their boots, Kanda stupidly thinks about going to sleep again soon.

\--

They find a small city and manage to get some food. Not enough, but Kanda also thinks no amount of food will ever be enough for Allen. It’s slightly alarming because they definitely don’t have enough money for Allen to fill his black hole of a stomach.

“We should probably do something about that,” Allen says with a nod before taking a big bite of a sandwich.

“We can’t stay anywhere for too long, so we can’t get a job,” Kanda says, considering, “we could rob someone.”

Allen turns to him immediately with wide eyes. “No!”

Kanda rolls his eyes and bites into a sandwich of his own. “Fine, we can rob some _ place _ .”

“We’re already running from the Order, the Noah,  _ and _ Akuma,” Allen points out, “why would you want to add local police to that list?”

_ Fair point. _ Kanda just shrugs and continues eating.

“We don’t have anything to sell, either,” Allen mutters in thought. “Maybe we could do street acts! I’d have to find a clown outfit, but how hard can that be? You could be my partner!”

Kanda just pretends he didn’t hear that. It’s better for all parties involved if that’s the case.

“Could’ve just said no,” Allen mutters, finishing the last bits of his food. “More importantly, we should find a place to stay for tonight. I think we walked by an inn when we first got here.”

Kanda stands up, dusting off his coat and adjusting Mugen to make sure it’s secured at his side. “Let’s go find out.”

Turns out, yeah, there was an inn that they walked by. It’s not particularly glamorous, but it’s cheap, and therefore it ticks all their boxes. Still, ‘cheap’ is almost half of their remaining money and that’s only for one room. Which means Kanda has the next eight hours to see if he’ll commit homicide or suicide first (he’s leaning towards the former).

Allen unlocks the door with a rattle of the old key in the doorknob and pushes it a little harder than he needs to. There’s a bit of dust from the motion, and he coughs while stepping in. Kanda follows, only to stop abruptly half a step in because Allen has stopped.

“I guess we should’ve seen this coming,” Allen admits dryly, looking at the one bed in the room. Allen turns to him with a shrug. “At least it’s not as small as it could be. I can take the floor?”

Kanda looks at the bed, then at Allen. He just shakes his head a bit; they can figure it out later. “I’m going for a shower first.”

“Don’t use all the hot water!” Allen calls after Kanda closes the bathroom’s door behind him, “or all the soap!”

His first response to that is, obviously, that he won’t. It’s not like they have the luxury of a shower long enough to use all the hot water. But then he steps under the water, and his muscles practically scream in relief when the hot (too hot, really) water greets them, and… okay, Kanda’s resolve to not use all the hot water is melting away.

(Still, he doesn’t use all of it. He washes his hair and watches all the dirt and dust flow down the white tiles into the drain, then washes his body, and forces himself to turn the water off. He deserves an award for this.)

Kanda spares a glance at himself in the mirror above the sink. There’s a crack in the frame and it’s not sitting right on the wall, but he doesn’t care enough to fix it. He trails the drops of water that fall off the tips of his hair and slowly come down his face with his eyes before looking at himself properly.

He looks tired. He  _ feels _ tired. He thinks about going to sleep, and then there’s suddenly a sharp image of a field of grass with a stream and rocks cutting through his thoughts like a steak knife, and—

Even if he sleeps, he doubts he’s going to feel rested when he wakes up.

“Oh, that was fast,” Allen comments when he comes out of the small bathroom with a towel over his hair. He’s just wearing his black pants and undershirt, the rest of his clothes rolled up in his hand. He drops the bundle and Mugen onto the mattress before sitting down beside them, watching the water fall onto the dirty, carpeted floor from the strands of hair the towel isn’t reaching.

“You’d better not have used up the hot water,” Allen says, hopping off the bed from the other side. The springs squeak softly, but that’s not what makes Kanda look up suddenly.

“Shh,” he says softly, instinctively reaching for Mugen.

“What’s wrong?” Allen pulls off his coat and tosses it onto the bed.

“Shh!” 

Allen blinks and whispers, “what?”

Kanda turns to the window, where he’s certain he just heard a shuffling sound. Allen just heard it, too, if his wide eyes are any indication. While Kanda unsheaths Mugen and stands up, he goes for the cheap decorative vase in the room, grabbing it like he’s planning to use it as a weapon.

“What—” Kanda starts, but doesn’t have the words for the question he wants to ask. He just rolls his eyes and turns back to the window, stepping towards it carefully. The curtains are drawn shut, but there’s definitely a shuffling sound - something like…  _ scratching? _

Kanda yanks the curtain open in one fluid movement and immediately swings his arm down.

A rat -  _ a fucking rat - _ jumps down from the windowsill and runs at his feet.

“Don’t kill it!” Allen yells suddenly, grabbing Kanda’s arm to stop him. 

Kanda watches him toss the vase aside before leaning down, carefully catching the (disgusting) creature in his hands.

“Can you open the window?” he asks Kanda, staring up at him with those ridiculously unblinking grey eyes. Kanda just sighs before flipping the latch and pushing the window open. Allen lets the rat out and quickly closes the window after it.

“You probably caught a hundred diseases from that,” Kanda comments with disgust. “Could’ve just let me kill it.”

“It didn’t do anything,” Allen says defensively. “Stop trying to solve problems with your sword!”

Kanda’s eyebrow twitches in irritation, and he raises his sword towards Allen, “go wash up—” and when Allen doesn’t go, “ _ —now. _ ”

“Fine, fine!” Allen holds his hands up in surrender before turning around and going into the bathroom. Once the door closes, Kanda turns back to the window, makes sure it’s locked, and pulls the curtains shut again.

He pulls the towel off his head and tosses it onto the bed on top of his coat. Mugen is next, carefully put back into its scabbard and clicked shut with that satisfying sound Kanda secretly loves hearing. He holds his sword longer than he needs to, momentarily tightening his grip around it.

He’s too exhausted for his dreams to haunt him like this.

He’s seen dreams of Alma before. He’s seen dreams of them as kids again, of a life they never got to live (neighbours in a lovely city that looks like it’s somewhere in France, running around the stone houses and weaving through the gardens), of their life in the Order (sometimes reliving everything that happened, sometimes seeing something new), and of the fight.

He’s seen more dreams of Alma than he’s willing to count. But those are of the past; memories and wishes woven into some ridiculous story that they either had to suffer through or never got to live. He’s never had a dream where Alma is  _ real _ . He’s never been fully conscious in his dreams. He’s always been watching himself from the sidelines.

Kanda already said goodbye to him - a whispered thing as he watched Alma and his old love walk away, while surrounded by lotuses that, for the first time, didn’t feel suffocating. Alma said  _ I love you, _ and Kanda said goodbye. That was that. That  _ should have been  _ that.

\--

“Can you really not tell?” Alma asks, lying down on the grass and watching the sunrise.

Kanda looks at him from where he’s sitting down beside him. Alma looks like he did during their fight, but also doesn’t. He looks like what he would’ve looked like if he’d grown up beside Kanda. The thought of that makes Kanda feel sick, so he pretends he doesn’t notice it.

“Tell what?”

“Why I’m here,” Alma says, “even though you said goodbye?”

Kanda looks at him with a shocked face. “Can you… what, read my thoughts?”

Alma just snickers at him. “I know you better than anyone, Yuu. I don’t have to read your thoughts to know what you’re thinking.”

Kanda doesn’t really like that, the thought of someone  _ knowing _ him. So, he says, “you don’t really know me.”

“Uh-huh,” Alma says flippantly. “But, really, do you not know?”

“Can’t you read my mind and figure it out?” Kanda shoots back before lying down on the grass beside Alma. The sky is still the same dark blue and orange. Belatedly, now, Kanda realizes he doesn’t know if it’s the sunrise or the sunset.

“I dunno,” Alma teases, “maybe I should let you figure it out yourself. What fun is it if I give you all the answers?”

“Stop being an asshole.”

Alma laughs in disbelief. “You, of all people, don’t get to say that to me!”

“I hate you,” Kanda mutters. “Why even bring it up if you’re not gonna tell me?”

“I didn’t bring it up,” Alma points out. “You did.”

“You know this is weird, right?” Kanda says slowly. “This isn’t what dreams are supposed to be like. It feels… this feels like I’m awake, but in a different world. I’m  _ conscious. _ That’s not how it’s supposed to feel.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never had dreams.”

Kanda turns to him in confusion, but Alma keeps his gaze fixed on the sky.

“When we were kids, we weren’t made to have dreams, so I never did. You did, and they tried to shut you down,” Alma says, “and then… I wasn’t really alive after that. Then I got revived - that felt more like waking up, I guess - and we fought, and then I died.”

“Oh,” Kanda realizes,  _ Alma really never had dreams. _

“Yeah, ‘oh’,” Alma repeats with a snicker. “You can be really slow sometimes, you know that?”

“Shut up,” Kanda says, wishing he had something like a pillow to whack Alma with. Instead of grass, they could be somewhere with a bed next time. Maybe that would be a nice place, too, to be with him; someplace like that little French town he used to dream of.

“You never told me,” Kanda says so softly it’s practically a whisper. “That you were… her.”

“Ah,” Alma says after a second. “That I was your old love?”

Kanda nods slowly, looking at the translucent orange clouds floating by. “Why didn’t you?”

“You were going to lose me one way or another. We never had a choice about that,” Alma says just as softly as Kanda. “You made a promise, though, that you’d always look for  _ that person. _ As long as you kept looking for her, you’d always be hers. I couldn’t tell you it was me, because… when you lost me, you’d lose her again, and if you found out, you’d stop looking for her.”

“If I’d known you were still…” there’s no word for it. Alma hadn’t been alive, but he hadn’t been dead. Kanda just waits a second, then continues, “I’d have looked for you. I would’ve tried to save you.”

“Oh,” Alma says affectionately, a little blush dusting his cheeks as he smiles. “I would’ve hated that, I think.”

Kanda laughs briefly despite himself. “Have I ever told you that you’re the worst?”

“Mm-hmm,” Alma says with a little laugh. “I would never have wanted that, though. I wanted you to move on - and you did. Look at you, you’re so cool now!”

It’s not like how he said it during their fight. This one has no edge to it. It’s just a genuine comment; Alma really thinks Kanda is cool.

“I would never want you to stay stuck in the past, running in circles after me,” Alma says softly. “Maybe I was a little selfish when I never told you I was her, after all.”

Kanda swirls that word around his mouth like a piece of gum. _Selfish._ _Selfish_ wasn’t Alma keeping that from him. _Selfish_ was Kanda holding onto some delusional thought that one day, he’d find his love (flowing light hair glittering in the sunlight, a blinding smile, a gentle voice calling out to him), and they’d run away together.

Kanda sucks in a sharp breath and sits up suddenly.

“That’s it,” he says, “that’s why.”

Alma shifts up on his elbows and frowns at him.

“That’s why you’re here,” Kanda says, “because this was supposed to be us. My life right now - this is what we wanted. We were going to run away. We wanted to go somewhere far away where no one could find us, just you and me.”

Alma looks at him with this look Kanda can’t quite place. He looks a little surprised, maybe a little proud, and maybe happy, but also a little sad.

“You found out,” Alma says finally, sighing softly before lying back down. “You’re right. At least, I think you are.”

Kanda looks at him. Alma looks grown up. He’s in Kanda’s clothes - clothes Kanda used to wear a few years ago; a black turtleneck with long sleeves and black pants and combat boots. He wonders if Alma had grown up beside him, if this war would’ve been over, if… they could’ve run away to someplace like this.

“‘Let’s run away’, you said,” Alma says with a small smile, like he’s reading Kanda’s thoughts again. “‘To a place where the Order and Innocence don’t exist’.”

“‘This time we’ll be together’,” Kanda finishes shakily. Alma sits up beside him. After a moment of silence, Kanda says, “I meant it.”

Alma smiles at him, and just for one second, it’s like they’re kids again — going places they’re not supposed to go, trying to get away from everyone and everything haunting them. “I know. I wish we could’ve.”

Kanda reaches out for Alma slowly, gently touching his hair at the side of his head before bringing his hand around to touch his cheek. Alma lets him; he even leans into his touch. In response, Kanda brings up his other hand, too, holding Alma’s face like it’s treasure - to him, it is.

“You came back to me,” Kanda whispers shakily.

“I never left you,” Alma corrects him gently. “You know what I think?”

Head swimming and heart pounding, Kanda shakes his head.

“I think I never really died. Not even once,” he says with a smile. “You never let me go. You kept me alive all this time, somewhere in your heart.”

Kanda belatedly realizes that his hands are shaking, but he doesn’t move them. Dizzily, because he can’t think of anything else, he says, “you’re here.”

Alma offers him a sweet smile (sweet enough to remind Kanda how much he hates sweets) and says, “where else would I go?”

\--

The innkeeper, as it turns out, apologizes profusely for the rat incident and even gives them back some of their money the next morning. He explains that there’s been a rodent problem in the city and he’s tried to keep them out of the inn with little luck. Kanda  _ sees _ the lightbulb light up above Allen’s head.

“Kanda,” Allen tugs on his arm, leaning up to whisper, “what if we stayed for a few days and helped out with it? We could make some money!”

“With the  _ rats? _ ” Kanda hisses back. “No.”

Allen gives him a pointed look at that, but turns back to the innkeeper anyway. “Do you happen to know how the problem started?”

“Ah, yeah, sure,” he says sheepishly. “The walls are pretty old in this building, so they’re easy for rats to chew and scratch through to get in. I’ve got some stuff to patch the walls up, but I never got around to doing it.”

Allen turns to Kanda with glittering eyes.

Kanda rolls his eyes in response. He’s already lost.

“We’d love to help!” Allen says with a bright grin.

It’s a solid deal; spend a few days patching up walls, stay at the inn for free, and make a little cash from it. The biggest risk is that they’ll stay in the same town for a few days in a row.

Alma would laugh his ass off if he could see him right now. Wearing some old clothes that aren’t even his while trying to figure out how to get cement on the wall in some half-decent way. He can practically  _ hear _ the laughter in his head.

“That’s too thick,” Allen says with a small laugh. “Add more water.”

Kanda’s first instinct is to not listen to him and slap his mixture on the wall out of pure spite. But, really, he’d rather listen to the fucking beansprout and not have to deal with a rat again, so he adds some more water and mixes the grey mixture together.

“Can I ask you something?” Allen asks, running a sheet of sandpaper over a wall they’re about to fix.

“You can  _ ask _ ,” Kanda says, grabbing the flat tool the old man gave them, using it to scoop up a bit of the mixture. He reaches up and smears it across the cracking wall.

“Will you answer?” Allen shoots back, using a flat tool of his own to spread the mixture across the wall evenly.

“Depends on the question.”

Allen sighs. Regardless, he asks, “are you afraid of rats?”

Kanda whips his head around to give Allen a ridiculous expression.  _ “What?” _

“I thought you were just disgusted by them at first, but you’re actually scared of them, aren’t you?” Allen teases.

Kanda grits his teeth. “No.” 

Allen only smiles, clearly not believing him. “It’s okay! If we see any, I’ll get rid of them so you don’t have to!”

Kanda just shakes his head a bit, wondering how the fuck this is his life right now.  _ Of all people to feel indebted to… _ “I’m not scared. I just hate them.”

“It’s alright to be scared! Lavi’s scared of birds!”

Kanda stifles a laugh at that. “Yeah, I know.”

Allen stares at him with wide eyes. “Was that a laugh? Did you just laugh?”

“Shut up.”

“You did!” Allen says excitedly. “You just laughed!”

“One more word and I seal your mouth shut with cement.”

Allen obediently shuts up. He still has that irritating smile on his face, but Kanda can’t do anything about that. He just smears cement over another part of the wall and ‘accidentally’ smudges a bit (a lot) of it on Allen’s face while pulling his hand back.

\--

“I’m going for a shower first tonight!” Allen declares the moment they step back into the room ( _ their room,  _ but Kanda won’t be caught dead saying or thinking that) after a full day of working with cement and sandpaper. At least there were no rats.

Kanda sits down on the bed, picking at a piece of dried cement on the back of his hand as he hears the water start running from the bathroom. The grey cement comes off in bits and pieces, cracking against his skin in a way that reminds him of all the times his body crumbled like chalk because he pushed himself too far.

He picks up Mugen, still lying beside the bed the way he left it when they started the work for the day, and runs his fingers over the handle. He slides it open an inch, then clicks it shut. This whole idea could blow up in their faces as quickly as they  _ (Allen, really) _ decided to stay. They’ve never stayed anywhere longer than one night; it’s safer that way.

Kanda lies back down on the bed. He holds Mugen to his chest, looking at the chipped paint and rippled cracks across the light grey of the ceiling. 

_ This was supposed to be us. My life right now - this is what we wanted. We were going to run away. We wanted to go somewhere far away where no one could find us, just you and me. _

He closes his eyes, trying to force the words out of his head. 

_ I know. I wish we could’ve. _

Kanda snaps his eyes open in irritation.  _ For the love of fucking— _

“I’m out,” Allen says, stepping out of the bathroom with a towel over his wet hair. He’s in his trousers and shirt, his jacket and coat folded on the small table in the room.

Kanda sits up after a second, leaving Mugen on the mattress beside him before standing up.

“Are you okay?” Allen asks with a small frown, always quick on the uptake. “You look…”

Allen doesn’t finish, probably because he can’t find the word, but Kanda doesn’t need him to. He just dismisses him altogether with a, “yeah,” and brushes past him to go into the bathroom.

(The dried cement is a bitch to get off.)

When he comes back out a few minutes later, still drying his hair half-heartedly with a towel, Allen is lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling with a dazed look. Kanda doesn’t ask about it. He just drops his rolled-up coat on the table beside Allen’s clothes and moves the towel down to the ends of his hair, catching the water droplets trying to fall down.

“Your hair isn’t much longer than it was when we first met,” Allen comments. “I just noticed that.”

Kanda shrugs a bit. It doesn’t grow particularly fast, but it’s not like he’s cut it since they first met. He sits down on his side of the bed before pulling the towel off his head. He stays sitting for a minute before giving up and lying down; his head lands beside Allen’s, but his body is lying in the opposite direction.

“What do you miss most about the Order?” Allen asks, sounding equal parts nostalgic and curious.

“Being drunk.” Kanda says bluntly.

Allen laughs. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk, though.”

“You wouldn’t have known. I got good at pretending to be sober.”

“What? Why?”

“Lenalee caught me drinking once and forced me to let her try it. She was a pain in the ass to get back to her room, so I stopped letting other people know I was getting drunk.”

Allen laughs again, this time more pleasantly. “I think I’d be a nightmare if I ever got drunk. I never will, though. I miss Jerry’s food.”

Kanda holds back a sigh. “Yeah, his soba was good.”

“I hope he’s doing well,” Allen says wistfully, “and everyone else back home, too.”

Kanda can’t relate to those sentiments; neither to wishing that anyone at the Order was doing well, nor to calling the Order his home. He doesn’t have to bite his tongue and hold onto some fleeting hope that he would find the woman from his dreams and broken memories if he stayed with the Order. He lost her, just like he lost Alma.

“I wonder what Lavi and Lenalee are doing right now,” Allen says, then laughs, “ah, I guess Lavi’s probably studying with Bookman, or something.”

Kanda misses the old man, actually. He made a good training partner. But this talk is making him feel something he doesn’t want, so he just says, “shut up and go to sleep.”

Allen smiles a bit. “You don’t like nostalgic talk, do you?”

Kanda rolls his eyes. “Give the boy a prize.”

He laughs. “Sorry, I find myself thinking of everyone back home a lot nowadays. It would be nice to be able to go back when all of this is over.”

Kanda lets his eyes drift shut as Allen continues talking.

“We could all eat together in the big cafeteria. Lavi would complain about having to study too much, and Lenalee would laugh and say something encouraging. Crowley would probably ask you how to eat soba again, but you wouldn’t tell him.”

The mental image is vivid and accurate. Allen leaves himself out of the description, but Kanda can picture him there; sitting at the table beside Lavi, a large pile of bowls and plates beside him, Timcanpy resting on his head with his golden tail curled around his ear.

“I wouldn’t,” Kanda agrees softly.

“I know,” Allen chimes. “Have you ever thought about what you want to do when this is all over?”

Kanda opens his eyes at that question. He used to. “Sometimes.”

“Me too,” Allen admits softly. “I wonder if I’ll get out of this alive.”

Kanda doesn’t tell him that he’s thought that, too. He doesn’t tell him that the only reason he can’t throw his life away is because of him. He just blinks slowly, feeling the unspoken words weigh down on his chest.

“It would be nice to go somewhere far away when it’s all over. Somewhere quiet and calm, where there are no attacks and no fighting.”

_ That,  _ he scoffs at. “We wouldn’t last two days in a place like that. We’re wired to function on destruction and war.”

Allen laughs. “I guess you’re right about that. Well, if all else fails, I’ll just be somewhere near you. That’ll keep my blood pressure up for sure.”

Kanda’s eyebrow twitches. “Shut the fuck up.”

Allen laughs again, but it’s a softer sound. They’re both too tired to continue this conversation. “Goodnight, Kanda.”

Neither of them move. They’re still lying sideways on the bed, legs hanging over the edge and their heads beside each other. The lamp in the room is still flickering. The blanket is folded at the foot of the bed, but neither of them move to reach for it.

Kanda just shifts his head slightly in a nod and lets his eyes drift shut.

\--

“A little French town?” Alma asks, fascinated. He’s sitting in Kanda’s lap this time, his back to Kanda’s front, as Kanda leans back against the rocks near the stream and rests his chin on Alma’s head.

“Yeah,” Kanda says, “it was a stupid dream I used to have. We were neighbours in some French town, somewhere with cobblestone sidewalks and little brick houses.”

“Maybe in another world, that’s the life we live,” Alma says, wrapping Kanda’s arms around himself. “Little French kids, running on cobblestone—” he laughs a little, “— why France, though?”

Kanda shrugs a bit. “It was far away from everything, back then. Not anymore, ‘cuz I’m in the European Branch, but back then, that was the furthest place I could think of.”

Alma does this thing with his hands where he runs the tips of his fingers up and down the length of Kanda’s forearms. It’s exceptional at turning Kanda’s brain into mush, which is just fine. Kanda doesn’t particularly want to be remembering the conversation he had with the beansprout about not getting out of this war alive.

“Say, Yuu,” Alma nudges his head up a bit. “Did you ever make a plan for us?”

“To run away?” Kanda guesses, feeling Alma nod against him. “Maybe. I might’ve tried, but they kept doing that thing where they fried my brains out until my body came back together, so I don’t remember any of ‘em.

“Me too,” Alma says sadly. “I think I had a plan. I kept thinking of someplace with a flower in the name. I thought that’d be pretty for us.”

_ A flower in the name, _ Kanda repeats to himself, then hums. “That doesn’t sound bad.”

“Yeah?” Alma asks with a smile that Kanda can hear. “Which flower would you want?”

A lotus crosses Kanda’s mind first, but his memories with those are too bitter for him to happily stay there. He doesn’t know all that many flowers, either, but then one crosses his mind and he can’t help but hold onto it like a lifeline. He thinks of someone he hasn’t thought of in a long time — someone he lost a while ago, someone he never got to say goodbye to.

“Daisy,” Kanda decides softly, “like Daisya.”

“Who’s that?” Alma asks after a second.

Kanda sighs. “Where do I begin with that walking headache?”

Alma laughs, settling back against Kanda comfortably, listening to him talk about his old brother, Daisya — all the times he was stupidly impulsive or overly caring or pretended he wasn’t worried about Kanda when he came back from a mission covered in bandages; all the times Kanda woke up in the middle of the night and saw Daisya sleeping beside his bed because he refused to leave his side until he was sure he would be okay.

Sometimes, Kanda wonders what Daisya would say if he was around now  _ (Holy shit, dude! A General? At least promise you’ll put in a good word for me when you get to the top, yeah?) _ . Daisya was stupid and a little too clumsy for his own good, but he was still growing into his own feet when he died.

Tiedoll took it the hardest of them all. Kanda knows how he keeps a photo of all of his kids in his pockets now, in case he has to say an unexpected goodbye again. 

Thinking back, Kanda has (albeit sometimes begrudgingly) hugged every member of the Tiedoll unit he grew up with except Daisya. Daisya came barreling towards him a few times, yelling that he was so excited to finally see him again, but that ended abruptly when Kanda drew Mugen out and glared at him. Somehow, now, Kanda wishes he hadn’t - maybe just once.

When Kanda tells him how he never got to say goodbye, Alma holds him just a little tighter. Kanda closes his eyes and soaks in the warmth of Alma’s body so close to his, wishing stupidly for this to last forever. He doesn’t want to lose Alma again.

“Daisies are nice,” Alma says, shifting his head to rest against Kanda’s shoulder.

Kanda lets his head drop into the juncture of Alma’s neck and shoulder in response, and tightens his arms around him slightly. “Yeah, he was.”

\--

On their third (and last) day of staying in the inn and this town, they finally get through all the walls with little holes in them, covering them up with cement and paint. They dealt with four rats over the course of the day, and Kanda nearly sliced the entire building in half when he saw their furry bodies scurrying around in a crevice in the wall.

“Is it weird that I’m somewhat sad to be leaving this town?” Allen asks as they get back to the room that night.

“Yes,” Kanda says immediately, pulling the ribbon out of his hair and throwing it onto the bed. He shakes his hair out, feeling the familiar pain of keeping it up for too long burning at his scalp, but doesn’t really care much.

Allen flops down onto the mattress that creaks in complaint. He makes some muffled sound into the blanket that Kanda only half-hears while grabbing a towel and going into the bathroom for a shower. He does think Allen is weird to be sad that they’re leaving the town soon, but he also understands the sentiment when he’s standing under the hot water of the shower.  _ This, _ he’s going to miss.

By the time he gets out, his arms have turned red from how much he’s scratched at them to get the dried cement off. Allen is sitting up on the bed when he comes back out, stretched out like a satisfied cat. His eyebrows rise slightly when he sees Kanda.

“You have to dry your hair properly,” he comments, shifting to sit up straight. “What if you get sick?”

“I’ll live,” Kanda says, pointedly pulling the towel off his still-wet hair and dropping it beside his shirt and coat on the table.

Allen snickers as he comes up to him, grabbing the damp towel and slapping it over Kanda’s head again. The only reason Kanda can come up with for him to do that is that he has a death wish.

“Here!” Allen says in a sing-song voice, purposely ruffling Kanda’s hair much more than necessary, even stretching up on his toes to do it properly.  _ If Mugen was any closer… _

Kanda settles for pushing Allen back with a hand to his shoulder and a sharp glare after yanking the towel back off. The movement sends a bunch of hair flying in his face, which makes the fucking beansprout laugh. He stops abruptly, though, when his gaze momentarily flickers down to Kanda’s torso, that he evidently is only now realizing is bare.

There’s a long moment of silence. Kanda just watches Allen with steady eyes, waiting for any sort of reaction or change in expression. For what feels like a full minute, Allen just continues staring, and it takes Kanda embarrassingly long to figure out that he’s looking at his chest.

At the tattoo on his heart.

“I got it in France before I came back to the Order,” he explains, although there’s no real need to.

“It’s, uh,” Allen says hoarsely, blinking rapidly. “Is it…?”

“A lotus,” Kanda fills in, “over my heart.”

Allen reaches out with a gloved hand, though he looks like he’s dazed and isn’t quite sure what he’s doing. If anyone asks Kanda why he didn’t stop him the moment he raised his arm, he’d say that it’s because he’s had a long few days and not because he’s curious about where this is going.

Allen’s hand just barely,  _ barely _ brushes his skin under his left collarbone, just slightly tracing the tip of the lotus flower when he suddenly yanks his hand back and clutches it to his own chest like it’s just been burned.

“Uh,” Allen says very eloquently, snapping his wide eyes back up to Kanda’s, “I’m gonna…”

And, with that, he goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind him with much more force than that door can handle, but it stays together (somehow). Kanda almost wants to laugh.

He doesn’t, though. He just places the towel down on the table and fixes his hair as much as he can with his hands before picking it back up to dry the long locks off properly. There’s a piece of cement stuck to the ends that he didn’t notice before, so he picks it off and watches it fall onto the cheap carpet.

He glances at the cracked mirror hanging above the table in the room, his own gaze moving down to the tattoo on his torso. It’s a large piece, the black ink burned into his skin from his collarbone down to his side; two lotus flowers beside each other, one right over his heart, the leaves weaving into each other.

He looks back down at the piece of broken cement. It really does remind him too much of all the times his body crumbled into pieces.

\--

There are dandelions scattered in the grass this time. Little circles of white waving gently in the breeze, the soft tufts flying away when Alma blows on them and laughs after. He flops down onto the grass, satisfied after pulling out and blowing on a million little dandelions.

“So, what depressing things have you been thinking about this time?” He teases, crossing his legs and reaching for some dandelions nearby. He doesn’t blow them away this time, and instead carefully ties their stems together in his lap.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kanda asks defensively.

“It’s not like you were thinking of anything happy,” Alma shoots back, “were you?”

“Shut up,” Kanda mutters under his breath, and that’s enough of an answer.

“Uh-huh,” Alma snickers. “So, wanna talk about it?”

Kanda just shakes his head. Alma doesn’t push, or say anything else at all for a minute. He just fiddles with… whatever he’s doing with the dandelions in his hands, then grins brightly at it after a minute.

“Here!” Alma declares, grabbing Kanda’s hand and awkwardly fitting the dandelion ring he’s somehow made onto his finger.

“Here… what?” Kanda blinks, staring down at the makeshift ring.

Alma wears an evil grin as he raises Kanda’s hand until it’s between their faces, then blows the white tufts of the dandelion into his face. Kanda coughs while moving away, letting his hand slip from Alma’s grip. Alma laughs hysterically at his reaction, then reaches out to pluck one white piece out of Kanda’s hair.

“Asshole,” Kanda mutters before reaching for one of the dandelions in the grass beside them. He plucks it, holds it up, and blows.

He barely loosens a few pieces of white that fall in the general direction of Alma, but not really. The failure sends Alma into another spiral of laughter while Kanda flushes in embarrassment.

“How can you be bad at that?” Alma asks through his laughter. “I don’t think you’re cut out for soft things, Yuu.”

“Shut up,” Kanda says sharply, intending to throw the dandelion over his shoulder when Alma catches his hand. He tilts it slightly and then blows on the dandelion, sending the white pieces flying between them, not looking away from Kanda’s eyes to watch them fall in their laps.

Kanda looks away first and drops the stem that’s still in his hand. Alma still doesn’t let go of his hand. Instead, he readjusts his grip so he can touch the dandelion ring on Kanda’s finger.

“What?” Kanda asks, feeling Alma fidget with the ring.

“Nothing,” Alma shakes his head slightly. “You just… looked really happy for a second.”

That catches Kanda off-guard. He just tips his head forward in a nod, looking at their hands rather than Alma’s face. Neither of them move for a second. Then Alma shifts forward slightly and bumps his forehead against Kanda’s.

“If I was alive for the ten years in between everything,” he admits softly, “I think I would’ve missed you the whole time.”

Kanda closes his eyes, soaking in the warmth he feels from Alma’s forehead still pressed against his. “I did.”

Alma pulls away, looking puzzled. “Huh?”

“I was conscious for the ten years in between. I kept replaying the time I killed you over and over in my head. When those Noah bastards dragged your body out of the Order’s basement, I forced myself to remember that you were dead, but… in some fucked up way, I thought I had a chance of getting you back,” Kanda says, exhaling shakily. “I missed you the entire time.”

Alma’s eyes fill with tears instantly and he drops Kanda’s hand to pull him into a tight hug. He’s half in Kanda’s lap, and their legs are awkwardly slotted together, but Alma is holding Kanda so tightly and running one hand through his hair while pressing his face into the side of his head, and Kanda really couldn’t care less about being comfortable right now.

“Can I say something really, really stupid?” Alma asks after a minute with a shaky laugh.

Kanda nods silently against his shoulder.

“I love you,” Alma whispers. “I wish I could’ve grown up beside you. I think we’d have made quite the pair, huh?”

Kanda lets out a weak chuckle. “You say that like you wouldn’t have gotten on my nerves every single day.”

“I know,” Alma says wistfully. Then, again, “I love you.”

The words echo in Kanda’s ears, ringing again and again and bouncing around his head. The last time Alma said that, Kanda felt him go limp in his arms. This time, he tightens his grip on Kanda, holding him as tightly as he possibly can, like he’s making a silent promise that he won’t die again.

“I know,” Kanda parrots softly, whispering the words for the second time in his life, “I love you.”

\--

They leave after three days of mixing cement and scratching walls with sandpaper. It wasn’t bad at all to have a bed to sleep on every night, and despite calling Allen weird for it, Kanda misses the rickety mattress the minute they leave the town. They hitch a ride on a wagon going east and pile into the back of it beside the stacks of boxes that are going to the wagon’s destination. It’s quite similar to the wagon Allen and Johnny were piled up in with Tiedoll and Kanda in the front.

They get off when the wagon stops in a different town, slightly bigger than the last one but still small. The air is more crisp and much, much more cold.

“It’s so cold!” Allen blows into his gloved hands before rubbing them together. The tips of his ears are already red, and there’s a cold wind floating by. At this rate, they’re both going to get sick.

“Wait here,” Kanda tells him before moving through the passing crowd to the closest coffee shop he can find. Allen hates bitter things, he remembers, and so he tells the coffee shop owner to put a shitton of sugar in one of the cups (and absolutely none in the other one).

Allen is sitting on a bench when he gets back, a foot away from where he left him. Kanda greets him by pressing the hot cup of coffee against his face.

He jolts in surprise, taking the warm mug gratefully.

“Oh,” he says after Kanda sits down beside him. “Is this coffee? I don’t—”

“— like bitter things, yeah,” Kanda takes a sip of the scalding hot drink. “There’s enough sugar in there to give you a cavity. Shut up and drink it.”

“Oh,” Allen says again, slower this time, and then nods, blowing on the drink twice before taking a slow sip. It’s sweet enough to drink, if the way his eyes light up is any indication of the taste. Just the thought of all that sugar in something makes Kanda feel sick.

“I can’t believe you remembered that I don’t like bitter things,” Allen says with a little smile.

“Yeah? ‘Cuz I was a real asshole when we met?”

Allen glances at him with a knowing look, not a smidge guilty, and then he looks away again with an awkward laugh. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

Kanda hums in the affirmative, taking a slow, long sip of his coffee while giving a pointed side-eye to Allen. With an amused smile hidden from Allen (because he refuses to look at Kanda), Kanda leans back and slings one arm over the back of the bench, resting one ankle on his other leg’s knee.

“Can I ask you something?” Allen asks with a careful glance at Kanda.

Kanda takes a sip of coffee and raises his eyebrow at Allen, prompting him to ask.

“What did you dream about last night?”

If Kanda’s reflexes were any slower, he would’ve choked on the coffee.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but—” Allen hesitates here, like he isn’t sure if he should say it. Then, he finishes, “— you said something in your sleep.”

Kanda’s blood runs cold. “What did I say?”

Allen glances at him, then quickly looks away. “Uh… ‘I love you’.”

There’s a long, long minute of silence between them where Kanda desperately hopes that isn’t true. But Allen doesn’t say anything to make him think he was joking, which means he really did say that in his sleep, and that’s just about the only thing in Kanda’s entire life that has made him understand the craving for the earth to break apart and swallow him whole.

Kanda regains his composure after a long sip of coffee that burns its way down his throat.  _ Fuck’s sake, _ he figures,  _ what the hell? _ “Alma.”

Allen turns to him with wide eyes.

“I dreamt of Alma.”

“Oh,” Allen says softly, a blush dusting his cheeks as he looks away again. Then after a second,  _ “oh.” _

Kanda wants to laugh despite himself. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing!” Allen says quickly, cheeks splotched red more from embarrassment than from the cold. “No, I… I’m glad you got to tell him that.”

Kanda hides a small smile around the mouth of the coffee cup as he tips it back to finish off what’s left inside. Then he crushes the cup in his hand and throws it out in the garbage bin near the bench. He’s more than certain that Allen saw the smile, but he doesn’t comment on it, which is just fine.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Allen says after throwing his own empty cup out. “That’s the first time I’ve actually drank coffee. It’s always been too bitter for me.”

Kanda just nods a bit before standing up and dusting his coat off. Allen stands up a second later and they set off again, in the cold wind and darkening day, looking for a place to spend the night. The same thing over and over again, until they know something better to do, or somewhere better to go.

Reality hits Kanda like a bucket of ice water. This is exactly how it would’ve been with Alma: aimlessly wandering from town to town, not knowing where they were, hoping no one followed them. There was never going to be a little French town with cobblestones and flower gardens. There was never going to be a happily-ever-after.

He was stupid to even dream of a happy ending. 

\--

Their resting spot for the night is a condemned building on the outskirts of the city. Half of it is broken and the other half is breaking, but it’s free, and that means it’s perfect for them. Allen checks around the debris for anyone or anything suspicious while Kanda goes for a half-intact set of curtains hanging over a broken window. He yanks the fabric down in one fluid motion, kicking up a ton of dust, but it’ll have to do for them to sleep on.

“I hope we don’t get sick from how cold it is,” Allen says, contemplating taking his shoes off. “Maybe we should go find an inn again.”

“Can’t keep wasting money,” Kanda mutters, setting Mugen down on the edge of the curtain he’s laid out on the floor.

“It’s not really a waste if it keeps us from freezing to death, is it?” Allen asks, but he honestly understands. He’s just arguing for argument’s sake.

Kanda folds one side of the curtain up a few times; it’s the closest thing they have to pillows if they can’t take their coats off to roll them up. They both lie down on the cold curtain, each taking a slow breath in and contemplating if any of this is worth sleeping outside in the freezing cold.

“There’s something on my mind,” Allen says, and Kanda just barely stifles a sigh; Allen asks way too many questions for someone who supposedly cares about his well being. “You said that you didn’t have to hide your hatred for the Order anymore now that Alma’s dead, but… you still do.”

Kanda grips a handful of his coat — his Order coat — at his side.

“You wouldn’t have gone back at all if you really hated them after Alma died. I don’t get it,” Allen tilts his head to the side to look at Kanda. “I can’t make sense of why you went back.”

There’s a brief moment where Kanda considers actually telling him. Instead, he says, “I told you, there are things I need to do before I die.”

“Yeah, but those things—”

“— are easiest to do when I’m still there,” Kanda finishes curtly. “I don’t like being there any more than you think I do, but I needed Mugen back, and I can’t die with this regret weighing down on me. Now, drop it."

Allen, obviously, does not drop it. “Was it something Alma said before he died? Did he tell you to let go of your hatred, or something? I don’t—”

“Keep talking,” Kanda cuts in sharply, turning to glare at him. “See where it gets you.”

That, somehow, does the trick, and Allen closes his mouth with an audible click. He turns back to the ceiling, and honestly lasts three seconds longer than Kanda thought he would before he speaks again.

“I don’t want to be responsible for anything that happens to you,” he says slowly. “I still can’t even trust my own hands. I’m afraid every day that I’ll wake up and I won’t be myself.”

Kanda swallows down a lump in his throat. How is he supposed to respond to that without telling Allen about how he feels responsible for everything that’s already happened to him?

“If I do something to hurt you, or I’m the reason you can never go back home—”

“You’re not,” Kanda cuts him off, sounding more earnest than he wants to, “the Order itself is the reason I wouldn’t go back, if that was ever the case.”

“But, still, I—”

Kanda is going to  _ kill _ him. He sits up suddenly, reaching over and grabbing Allen’s face to shut him up.

“Look,  _ listen closely. _ My problems with the Order started long before you waltzed in, and they’re going to exist long after both of us are six feet under. Stop pretending that everything in the fucking world is your fault; that’s going to kill you long before any Noah will, and then you’re going to be no use to anyone.”

Allen looks up at him with wide eyes, nodding as much as he can in Kanda’s grip that he’s sure is at least somewhat painful.

“For probably the first time in my life, I can make my own choices about where I am and who I’m affiliated with, and that’s what I’m doing. I can do whatever I want, and if anyone has a problem with that, they can take it up with me. Stop using my decisions to feel sorry for yourself."

Allen nods again, this time making some whimpering sound, and Kanda finally lets go of his face. There are little wedges in his cheeks from where the tips of Kanda’s nails pressed into his skin, pushing through his gloves until they left marks on Allen’s face.

“Okay,” Allen says finally, rubbing his cheeks, “you’re right, I’m sorry. But it’s not that I’m using your decisions to feel sorry for myself, it’s just that I’m worried.”

“I don’t need you to worry,” Kanda shoots right back.

Allen sits up suddenly, glaring at him. “You don’t get to decide whether or not I worry.”

“I get to decide if it’s about me, and I don’t want your fucking pity!”

“It’s not  _ pity, _ it’s genuine concern and if you can’t see that, I—”

_ “I don’t want to—” _

There’s an echoing silence after Kanda raises his voice. He never finishes his sentence, and Allen never prompts him to. They just stay like that, the words hanging in the air between them, and Kanda realizes how close he was to saying  _ I don’t want to be indebted to you more than I already am. _

“What?” Allen asks finally, curiosity probably getting the better of him. “You don’t want to…?”

“Forget it,” Kanda mutters. He lies back down and rolls onto his side so he doesn’t have to see Allen anymore.

Allen only lies back down after a minute of staying sitting; Kanda can feel it when the curtain shifts. It’s silent between them — no “goodnight”, no apologies.

The thing is, there’s a part of Kanda that wants to say it. It would make Allen stop bringing this question up, for one, and it would probably just make everything more clear for him. As perhaps the world’s leading authority on not saying what he wants to say when he has the chance to, he should know better.

So, Kanda takes a deep, steadying breath.

“You only became a Noah because of the fight with Alma,” he says finally, practically forcing the words out, “or, whatever, you were a Noah before that, but it didn’t come out until that fight, because you let yourself get fucking  _ shredded _ trying to stop me from killing Alma. Having you worry about me after I did that to you feels like a slap in the face.”

Allen stays dangerously still and quiet, and Kanda wonders if he went to sleep, but then he shifts, sitting up again. “That’s it, then? That’s why you’re risking everything and running around with me? Because you feel like you owe me?”

Kanda doesn’t respond. He already feels like he’s swallowing rocks.

“You… are so unbelievably stupid.”

_ That  _ gets his attention. He turns onto his back to glare up at Allen. “Huh?”

“Regardless of whether or not there was a Noah inside me, I would’ve let myself get shredded to stop you from killing Alma. You weren’t yourself, you were—” he pauses, searching for the right word, then gives up and asks, “— is what why you went back, too? So you could find me?”

_ Among other things, _ Kanda thinks, but doesn’t say.

“ _ You _ —” Allen clearly bites back something, then hides his face in his hands and makes some strangled sound. “I can’t believe you! You’ve been doing all of this with me —  _ for  _ me — because you feel indebted?”

“I can do what I want,” Kanda says stubbornly.

“Kanda, you are the most infuriating person I’ve ever known. You’re stubborn and violent and you can never say what you’re thinking. You have the decency of a pirate and you curse like a sailor. You can be an asshole sometimes and you have zero conversation skills. But, even then, you’re risking your life because you feel like you owe me, and—”

Allen sighs, moving his hands away to give Kanda a sincere smile. “— that might just be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me."

Kanda’s heart could’ve stopped. If it were any weaker, it probably would’ve. That might be the most genuine expression of gratitude anyone has ever given Kanda, which says a lot given that he once ran across a hill to grab a piece of paper that flew out of Tiedoll’s sketchbook and returned it to him.

He just nods weakly, swallowing over a lump in his throat that he doesn’t remember being there, and, silently, from the bottom of his heart, makes the most selfish wish he’s ever made; he wishes for this to last forever. He doesn’t want to lose Allen again.

Allen lies back down beside him and stays silent for a second before letting out a hoarse laugh.

“We’re so incredibly stupid, aren’t we?”

Kanda turns his head to him, finding Allen already looking back with those innocent, emotion-filled eyes. He can’t quite tell what emotion they’re filled with, but he also somehow knows exactly what emotion it is.

“Yeah?” Kanda finds himself asking softly, much softer a tone than he’s ever used with the beansprout.

“Yeah,” Allen parrots, looking at Kanda like he’s etching every detail of his face into his memory, like if he looks away now, he’ll lose him. Kanda wonders if he isn’t looking at Allen with an identical expression.

The thing is, Allen never finishes his thought, but Kanda knows exactly what he means. He knows it in the way Allen’s gaze flickers down to his mouth momentarily before travelling back up to his eyes. He knows it in the way his own gaze shifts to Allen’s mouth, in the momentary thought of wanting to pull Allen’s bottom lip out from where it’s trapped between his teeth.

All he does is, ultimately, is look away. 

“Goodnight, Kanda,” Allen whispers into the darkness, his voice somehow echoing off the walls and seeping into Kanda’s bones.

It’s stupid. Regardless of what they feel, they can’t do anything about it. They don’t have the luxury of being able to act on and explore things like that, not when they’re too busy trying not to get hunted down every single day.

Kanda lets his eyes drift shut in the reverberating silence. He doesn’t know how much time passes before he finally unclenches his jaw and whispers, “yeah.”

\--

There’s a sharp  _ click _ that wakes Kanda up. He can’t have been asleep for long at all, because there’s not a shred of his dream that he remembers, but he wakes with a start. It’s still dark, and Allen is asleep beside him, but he’s sure he heard that sound and it leaves a bad taste in his mouth because he knows something is coming.

Kanda shakes Allen awake with one arm, his other arm reaching for Mugen. Allen stirs awake with a slight hum, suddenly sitting up once he realizes he’s being woken.

“What?” he asks, voice scratchy as he blinks the sleep out of his eyes and messily ties his hair back at the top of his head.

There’s a brief moment where it’s quiet, too quiet, and nothing at all moves. Neither of them make a sound, like they both know it’s too good to be true.

They’re proven right when there’s a sudden and rapid onslaught of bullets being fired into the building. Several things happen at once.

One, Kanda recognizes the sounds to be the weapons of Level One Akuma, and there has to be a few of them given the variety of directions that they’re being attacked from simultaneously.

Two, Allen grabs Kanda’s hand to yank him out of the way of falling debris, which spectacularly causes Kanda’s brain to short circuit (but he’s quick to recover).

Three, there are no Noah accompanying the Akuma, or else they would’ve made their appearance by now. That makes their job  _ much _ easier.

Kanda unsheaths Mugen and watches it spark to life before jumping out of a broken window, looking up to see the handful of Level One Akuma turn to him slowly, repositioning their weapons to aim and—

“Kanda!”

Allen crashes into him, sending them both tumbling onto the ground as an array of bullets hits the ground where Kanda just was.

“You almost died!” Allen yells, though he’s really scolding him, and Kanda will  _ definitely _ yell at him for this later.

“Move!” Kanda barks out, pushing him off and jumping on the falling debris to get up to where the Akuma are, slicing through one in one fluid motion.

He sees Allen tear through another one from the corner of his eye. There are still a handful of them left, but they’ve killed a Level Four before; they can handle this.

The next few minutes are full of muscle memory and the familiar sounds of Akuma firing bullets before being cut through and screaming as they disappear. There’s a sudden frustration clawing at Kanda’s chest that makes him think that he -  _ they _ \- almost got past this, they almost got away, they almost could’ve left this shit behind and gone somewhere, far away, where the Order and Akuma and Innocence don’t exist.

He takes it out on the Akuma, cutting and slicing until they turn to ash. From the corner of his eye, Kanda sees Allen doing no different. That action turns out to be a mistake, because in the split second that he looked away, a bullet from the last Akuma in front of him goes through his shoulder.

“Kanda!” he hears Allen yell again, but the sound almost  _ (almost) _ gets drowned out by the immediate noise the Akuma makes when Kanda shreds it with Mugen. His shoulder throbs from the action and blood soaks through his clothes in seconds.

They both land on the roof of the broken building (it’s staying up enough for them to stand on it) after all the Akuma are gone, and Allen runs over the second his feet hit the concrete. 

“Kanda, your shoulder!” He says, grabbing at it and pressing down like that doesn’t send a wave of pain through Kanda’s body.

“Get—” Kanda growls,  _ “off.” _

“You’re going to lose blood if we don’t stop it, stop fighting back!” Allen says, sounding urgent for someone who knows Kanda will heal. The pressure on his wound makes Kanda feel dizzy, and he sits down while still trying to get Allen off his wound because it actually  _ fucking hurts _ and he’s got about ten seconds to get off before Kanda throws rational thought out of the window and stabs him.

Allen pulls the band out of his hair and ties it tightly around Kanda’s shoulder, squeezing his bicep to slow the blood flow.

Kanda can already feel himself healing. His vision has spots of black in it as he blinks rapidly, like little cracks slowly crumbling away as he loses blood. He thinks Allen is saying something but he can’t really hear him as the cracks in his vision take over more and more until it all goes black.

\--

“Yuu,” he hears a soft whisper.

_ Alma,  _ he wants to respond, but he can’t find the words. He can’t feel anything. He can’t see anything. It’s all dark.

“Yuu, can you hear me?”

_ Yes, _ he wants to say. He tries to say it, but he can’t speak.

“Breathe,” Alma whispers, his voice feeling like a velvet blanket lifting Kanda’s body off the ground until he’s floating. “Stay with me.”

_ I’ll stay. _

There’s a warmth on his forehead, like Alma is pressing his against Kanda’s. “Live.”

_ Live. _

“Live, Yuu,” Alma tells him -  _ begs _ him. “Please, you need to live.”

_ I’ll live, _ Kanda wants to promise. He doesn’t want to lose him.

“Live.”

Kanda wants to see him.

“There’s someone waiting for you,” Alma tells him. “Don’t leave him.”

The words echo. It feels like something lifts off his chest as he hears them bounce back to his ears again and again. It feels like he’s flying.

_ I won’t, _ Kanda promises. He never says the words, but he knows Alma hears them. He knows they reach. He knows it in the way he can feel his shoulder stitch itself back together, in the way he can feel his heart beat in his chest, in the way he knows,  _ he knows, _ that someone is waiting.

That someone is calling.

“—nda!”

_ Someone is calling. _

“—anda!”

_ Breathe. Live. _

“Kanda!”

Kanda takes a sudden, shuddered breath in, his eyes flying open. He’s struggling to breathe for the first few seconds, scrambling to sit up properly. His vision is blurry and hazy at the edges, and it’s  _ hot and suffocating _ and he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing.

“Hey,” says a voice from beside him, concerned and careful, “Kanda?”

Kanda turns his head to see Allen. Allen, with his worried, unblinking grey eyes. Allen, with a small cut on his right cheek. Allen, with his hair down and strewn across his face because the band he uses to tie it up is on Kanda’s shoulder right now. Allen, with his worrying nature and bright smile and flowing light hair glittering in the moonlight, a blinding smile in relief, a gentle voice calling out to him—

“Kanda,” he says with a small laugh. “You’re okay.”

_ Fuck it. _

Kanda grabs the back of his head and pulls him in.

The first thing he feels is Allen’s mouth on his, slightly open from what he’s sure was about to be a small sound of shock or protest. The second thing he feels is Allen’s hands on his shoulders followed by one of them suddenly leaving his shoulder - the one that was just shot - and settling on clutching the coat around his forearm instead.

The third thing he feels is… something he’d die before saying.

Allen pulls away first to suck in a sharp breath, something neither of them have done for the duration of that kiss, however long it was. Allen’s eyes are wide and uncertain but blown half-black from adrenaline and there’s something so unbelievably stupid in Kanda that makes him want to do that again.

“That wasn’t…” Allen asks weakly, “that wasn’t just because of the adrenaline, right?” 

Kanda wants to yell that of course it wasn’t. Except… he’s suddenly dizzy again, and his grip on Allen’s head turns tighter when he scrambles to hold on for balance.

“Ah— hey, hey, careful,” Allen carefully lowers him down onto his back, fingers pulling at the cloth around his shoulder. The blood has stopped, and the wound is already almost healed.

Kanda wants to respond to the earlier question, to tell him it wasn’t just adrenaline. He can’t, though, and instead just squeezes his eyes shut to will away the headache that makes him want to scratch his skin off.

“Are you okay? Where does it hurt?” Allen asks, gently shaking Kanda, trying to coax him into saying something. “C’mon, you have to work with me. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

_ Nothing, _ he wants to bite out. He just brings a hand up to clutch at his head, hoping it’ll make the headache go away, but it doesn’t. Allen pushes Kanda’s arm away to hold his face, running his thumbs over his temples.

“Kanda,” he whispers, “breathe.”

Kanda takes a shuddering breath in.

“Stay with me,” he says softly. Then, again, “breathe.”

Kanda does, again and again, as much as he can. He bites out a weak, “it’s not,” hoping that Allen will understand what he’s trying to say, but the pain is so sharp and piercing that he can only manage a handful more struggled breaths before it all goes black again.

\--

Kanda wakes up with a jolt.

He’s lying on the familiar curtain he remembers going to sleep on, and for a split second, he thinks that the entire ordeal with the Akuma was some fucked up dream. Except, the building around him is severely more broken than it was when he first got here, and sunrise has definitely passed given the light flooding in through the cracks, and he’s…  _ alone. _

He sits up, touching his shoulder where he’d been injured. His coat is ripped, but he’s otherwise entirely healed. There isn’t even a scar.

Mugen is lying by his side, so he grabs it and stands up, looking around for a familiar head of white hair. There’s nothing, though, not even a spider on the walls, and that… is shockingly nauseating.

He moves for the window through which they entered the building in the first place, about to go out through it when the front door creaks open. Mugen is unsheathed before he realizes it, but he stops mid-swing when he just sees Allen wander back in with two cups in his hands.

“Oh, you’re awake!” he says when his eyes finally land on Kanda. “How are you feeling? You passed out again last night so I carried you back down, but there haven’t been any more Akuma or anything.”

Kanda stares, dumbfounded, and lowers Mugen as Allen approaches.

“Here, I got you a coffee! I made sure that they didn’t put any—”

He drops Mugen, grabs Allen’s face with both hands, steps in, and kisses him again. Allen’s hands don’t come up this time because they’re full of coffee cups, but that’s just fine, because him stretching up onto his toes in return is enough of an answer.

“It’s not,” he says again after he pulls back, still holding Allen’s face, his voice still rough from sleep. “It wasn’t. Adrenaline, I mean — it wasn’t just adrenaline.”

Allen blinks slowly. Then he smiles and nods. “Okay.”

Kanda nods in return, taking a step back and clearing his throat. He picks up Mugen and slides it into its scabbard, taking the cup of coffee from Allen’s outstretched hand.

“Were you worried that I was gone when you woke up?” Allen asks, half-teasing and half-curious. He takes a slow sip from his own cup, looking at Kanda with raised eyebrows over the rim.

“No,” Kanda says easily, “you’re here.”

Allen’s eyes widen slightly in surprise. He laughs, then, a sweet sound (sweet enough to remind Kanda how much he hates sweets), and says, “where else would I go?”

**Author's Note:**

> title is from against the current's sweet surrender; dedicated to hibah ♡
> 
> the "you're here" "where else would i go?" dialogue is inspired by hannibal ("stay with me" "where else would i go?")
> 
> i absolutely wasn't joking about how many parallels there are in this. if you can catch them, you have my heart! i put a ton of work into this and cried a million times over the seven weeks it took to write this. i'm so, so proud of how this ended up. i've never successfully written anything for d.gray-man before and i am so glad that this one turned out as well as it did. it might be one of my favourite things i've ever written.
> 
> apologies if allen seems ooc at times. i tried really hard, but his balance of sweetness and snarkiness is an art i am yet to perfect.
> 
> thank you for reading! come say hi on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/dilfuruichi)


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